Montreal Canadiens: Will ice hockey’s top trophy return home after 28 years?

The Montreal Canadiens are in the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since their 1993 win. Could the storied ice hockey franchise be the ones to bring the trophy back to Canada - and also end the longest championship drought in the team's history?

The Habs weren't meant to be in the Stanley Cup finals.

The century-old franchise struggled with injuries, a Covid-19 outbreak, and a lacklustre performance during the regular season.

But now the team that had, in the words of ice hockey historian Eric Zweig, been "treading water for close to 30 years" is on the cusp of a stunning if improbable comeback.

They are now what could be days away from earning hockey's most prestigious trophy and restoring the national glory of "Canada's game" - or notching a heartbreaking defeat.

Carey Price, 33, tends net for the Montreal Canadiens

It's been a decade since Canada had a team in the National Hockey League finals, when the Vancouver Canucks lost to the Boston Bruins.

It's a "weird paradox" that the country that supplies about half of the ice hockey players to North America's professional league hasn't won the Cup since Montreal's 1993 victory, says hockey writer Andrew Podnieks.

The Stanley Cup could arguably be said to be as totemic to Canada as the maple leaf or the loon. It was first awarded in 1893 and named after then-Governor General of Canada Lord Frederick Stanley.

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And while hockey might seem less the national sport as Canadians tune into the Euros football tournament or rally behind Toronto's Raptors basketball team, "I still think deep down that hockey's our game", says Zweig.

The roots of Montreal's team run deep and are woven into the history of the city.

Founded in 1909, got its popular nickname - the Habs - from "Les Habitants", a term for some of the early French settlers in what's now the province of Quebec.

They keep company with the great sports franchises like the New York Yankees or New England Patriots, with an epic run of championship wins from 1953 to 1979, when they brought home 16 Stanley Cups.

Fandom has become inseparable from the city's cultural identity in a province where passion for ice hockey has long been likened to a popular religion.

Another team nickname, La Sainte-Flanelle, a reference to the club's jersey, hints at the fan fervour. They're also known as Nos Glorieux - our glorious ones.

"Montreal - it is hockey," says commentator and former Olympic coach Danièle Sauvageau.

Yet fans have seen a very long drought. Their last Stanley Cup win was half a lifetime ago, and since then each season has seen failures rooted one problem or another, whether coaching or management or team dynamics, line-ups and injuries.

As with the Anna Karenina principle, winning teams are all alike, every losing team loses in its own way.

The last time the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup was in 1993

To get where they are now - the NHL finals against the defending champions, the Tampa Bay Lightning - they had to beat their long-time rivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs, in the first-round playoffs. They then swept the Winnipeg Jets in the second round before a semi-finals faceoff with the heavily favoured Vegas Golden Knights.

The season had not gotten off to such a promising start and the franchise was not expected to make the finals.

"They did not seem like a team that could win the Stanley Cup - they just didn't," says Zweig. "They definitely stumbled into it for sure."

But somewhere along the way the team gelled.

Goaltender Carey Price - who helped Canada win ice hockey gold in the 2014 Sochi Olympics - began turning out a performance that put an end to critics wondering if he was worth his estimated $10.5m (£7.6m) annual salary.

And in May, as they beat the Leafs, young players like centre Jesperi Kotkaniemi and right-winger Cole Caufield, both 20, and 21-year-old Nick Suzuki, "just learned how to win," says Sauvageau.

This season the team, with its historic links to the city's French-speaking community, marked another moment, playing a game without a single Quebec-born player on the ice. It was a first for a team from a province where language and cultural politics are hotly debated, and identity and sport intersect.

The Canadiens have historically had many Quebec players on its roster, it's now mix of players from Canada, the US, Finland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Russia, France and Slovakia.

Only two players - forwards Philip Danault and Jonathan Drouin, who is on an indefinite leave of absence - are from the province.

Sauvageau laughs that recently she hasn't "heard a lot about whether we should have more Quebec players - we're winning, that's what took over".

"At this point they're all Quebecois - we just want to adopt all of them. But the conversation will come back, and I think it's important to have."

Tampa Bay Lightning are the defending champions and widely seen as the dominant team

If the Habs do pull off the unlikely win against Tampa, they'll have broken both their own Stanley Cup dry spell and Canada's.

Says Zweig: "Being Canadians and living in the shadow of the United States - we always have that bit of an inferiority complex anyway, so this is a bit of a 'Ha! We finally got it back.' And I think people feel that."

Canadians have long complained about what they view as the "Americanisation" of "Canada's game" even as the NHL - headquartered in New York - sought to aggressively expand into the US market, he says.

While there may be some domestic rivalries at play, like "historic hatred" between Toronto and Montreal, Sauvageau thinks Canadians will still catch Habs fever.

"We always wish for a Canadian team to be in the finals," she says.

And she has hope that the Canadiens can build on their momentum, despite stumbling into the finals with two losses against Tampa in the best-of seven series.

The Lightning won hockey's Holy grail last season and are the Goliath in these finals - at least on paper.

So a Canadiens victory would be an upset, but not impossible, says Sauvageau - "because hockey is [played] on ice and not on paper".

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